Jonathan Hill – charming consensus-builder

When Lord Hill of Oareford was unveiled as the UK’s designate European Commissioner in July, the reaction in Brussels came in two forms. The first was the question:“Lord Who?” The second was an observation that he must be a Eurosceptic.

While the latter claim had to be dismissed by Jonathan Hill’s friends in the British Labour Party, the “Lord Who” quip did not bother him at all. After all, this is a man described by Sunday Times columnist Camilla Cavendish as possessing an “almost pathological modesty”, while a former ministerial colleague says he “absolutely does not seek the limelight, meaning he is consistently underestimated”.

Even before British Prime Minister David Cameron took the unprecedented step of voting against Jean-Claude Juncker’s Commission presidency, it was assumed that he would send a high-profile former cabinet minister to the Berlaymont, the Commission’s headquarters. Only names like former conservative leaders William Hague or Michael Howard could, it was said, restore British influence inside the institutions, bag a strategic dossier and lessen the odds that the UK votes to quit the European Union after 2017.

Yet to the astonishment of many, when Juncker unveiled his college line-up it was the unflashy 54-year-old Hill who had hit the bullseye: commissioner for financial stability, financial services and capital-markets union. Winning this position was largely down to painstaking diplomacy and suited Juncker’s strategy of giving the big powers their target dossiers, but it was also due in no small part to Hill himself.
His non-ideological approach to policymaking and obvious respect for officials won him trust over the summer – a charm offensive that was less successful during European Parliament hearings where MEPs were already deeply sceptical about putting banking oversight into the hands of a British conservative. Hill would not deny being British or a conservative, but those MEPs who believe he is coming to Brussels with pre-conceptions beyond a commitment to regulated capitalism and choice are mistaken.

Jonathan Hill – he was made a non-hereditary member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament, so he could join the government in 2010 – was raised in North London as the youngest of three children to Cornish parents: Rowland, a small insurance broker, and Paddy (her parents had been fans of Gertrude Page’s novel “Paddy the Next Best Thing”), an English teacher. It was a middle-class Tory home but with a light touch; politics were rarely discussed, unlike his parents’ first loves: literature on his mother’s side, and music on his father’s side.

After attending Highgate School, Hill went to Cambridge to study history and was persuaded by Norman Stone, a charismatic conservative expert in German and Russian history, to stay and start a PhD. But unlike his fellow doctoral student Orlando Figes, Hill felt unsuited to academic life and returned to London in 1983, working successively in a bar, for banker Jacob Rothschild and as an editor in a publishing house.

Unsettled, Hill was told by a friend who had worked at the Conservative research department to apply for a job with the party’s internal think-tank and, in 1985, his political career began. Researching employment just as Margaret Thatcher’s government turned from a single-minded pursuit of price stability to active labour-market policy proved fortuitous, and Hill quickly followed Ken Clarke, who had been promoted into the cabinet, into the employment department as an adviser. There followed three years with Clarke, who later became the Tories’ most prominent Europhile, at the departments of industry and health before Hill quit to work for Tory public-relations guru Tim Bell.

After only two years in the private sector, Hill rejoined the government, this time at the prime minister’s office – first in its policy unit, then as John Major’s political secretary, through the surprising election victory in 1992 to the fraught negotiation and parliamentary passage of the Maastricht treaty in 1994. These were the dog days of factionalism in the Conservative Party as Eurosceptism began to grip the party, leading to its heavy defeat in 1997 and a 13-year exile in opposition.

Curriculum vitae

1960: Born in London on 24 July 1960
1979-83: Studied history at Trinity College, Cambridge
1985-86: Conservative research department
1986-89: Special adviser to Ken Clarke at departments of employment, trade and industry, and health
1989-91: Consultant at Lowe Bell Communications
1991-94: Prime Minister’s office
1994-98: Consultant at Bell Pottinger Group
1998- Founding director of Quiller
2010: Consultancy
2010-12: Parliamentary under-secretary of state for schools
2013-14: Leader of the House of Lords
2014-: European commissioner for financial stability, financial services and capital-markets union

Crisis management may be critical in the formation of the most effective politicians and officials, but it is also exhausting. Hill left government in 1994 and, apart from popping back to advise Major during crises in 1995 and 1997, he stayed in the private sector for 16 years. After another short spell with Bell, he met John Eisenhammer, a former journalist with centre-left sympathies, and together they formed a communications, advisory and lobbying firm from scratch in 1998. So successful was Quiller Consultancy that, within a decade, the partners sold up to PR firm Huntsworth for €13 million and Hill, approaching 50, was looking forward to spending more time with his wife Alex and their three children, gardening, walking on Exmoor and reading history and fiction.

It did not happen. In May 2010, the newly-elected Cameron called and asked Hill to join his coalition. He and Michael Gove, the education secretary, wanted to emulate what Labour had done by appointing Andrew Adonis, a reforming but consensus-building schools minister to steer legislation through the House of Lords, the UK’s upper house of parliament. Hill jumped at the job.

Over nearly three years, he led a legislative campaign to open Swedish-style ‘free schools’ and oversaw the transfer of management control from municipalities to thousands of state schools and their sponsors – a policy in continuity with Adonis and his boss Tony Blair but opposed by the left. “The House of Lords is a political environment where consensus-building has a premium and where, by building respect, you push your agenda through,” says a former colleague. “Jonathan was so successful that he was an obvious choice for leader.” In January 2013, Cameron chose Hill as leader of the House of Lords, a role in which he thrived and won admirers across the aisle in the Labour Party.

When it came time to find his commissioner, Cameron considered the political advantages of several candidates, both for the message their appointment would send to Eurosceptics and Juncker alike. But, in the end, he decided that there was one thing he needed – a fixer – and one thing he did not – a by-election. Once the prime minister had reached that conclusion, Hill was the stand-out choice.

Since landing the job, Hill has impressed the Commission services and his private office with his open-mindedness toward policy options as well as his political antennae. It was those antennae rather than ignorance that prompted his diplomatic evasion of a question about “eurobonds” at his first hearing – a politically sensitive issue outside his remit. He knows these hot political questions will keep coming during the transition, but understands that his five-year term will be judged not on these ideological dividing-lines but on its strategic success in weaning the EU’s private sector off excessive reliance on bank finance and in creating sustainable jobs.

Now firmly in the saddle, after a much smoother second hearing before MEPs, the big challenge for Hill will be to unpick national rules that guarantee and protect capital markets, without draining a future capital-markets union of the confidence that it will need to operate effectively. Doing all this in time for it to have any meaningful impact on Europe’s current economic woes may be even more challenging.
If, by the time of the European elections in 2019, capital-markets union has matured from a slogan into something as real and significant as banking union and the UK’s presence in the EU has at least stabilised, then those that asked “Lord Who?” will be praising Cameron for his shrewd choice.